Hudson Associates was founded in 1988 and has remained a small practice focused on personal attention to high quality work specialising in landscape assessment. Through experience, this focus has expanded into resource consent applications and expert witness, with successful appearances at numerous Council hearings and Environment Court Appeals. The practice is now also frequently engaged by Council’s to peer review colleagues work and prepare expert evidence for plan changes, designations and consent hearings. John Hudson has a current Making Good Decisions hearing commissioners certificate, with John being engaged on a number of large scale hearings in this role.

By remaining small with specialist expertise, the practice remains independent of commercial allegiances and is generally free of conflicts of interest.

The practice has values that respect the client’s input and their right to undertake activities and change on their land to co-operatively come to a place of mutual satisfaction whereby the landscape and natural environment values are preserved and the clients brief is achieved. The practice philosophy is to identify and maintain underlying landscape values, thereby allowing human influence and change to be integrated with the landscape.

While the office has moved to Hawke’s Bay for family and lifestyle reasons, the practice undertakes work throughout from Whangarei to Otago. John is frequently in Auckland or Wellington, spending the majority of his time travelling to clients and sites throughout the country. Travel presents no obstacle, as the practice has always served a diverse selection of clients across a wide range of geographic locations. Visiting Marlborough Sounds jetties in the morning, capital city meetings in the afternoon and an Auckland City hearing the following day are not unusual events in the diary.